The Rio Grande was the epitome of mountain railroading, with a motto of Through the Rockies, not around them and later Main line through the Rockies, both referring to the
Rocky Mountains.
The D&RGW operated the highest mainline rail line in the
United States, over the 10,240 feet (3,120 m)
Tennessee Pass in Colorado, and the famed routes through the
Moffat Tunnel and the
Royal Gorge. At its height in the mid-1880s, the D&RG had the largest
narrow-gauge railroad network in
North America with 2,783 miles (4,479 km) of track interconnecting the states of Colorado,
New Mexico, and Utah.[1] Known for its independence, the D&RGW operated the Rio Grande Zephyr until its discontinuation in 1983. This was the last private intercity
passenger train in the United States until
Brightline began service in
Florida in 2018.

In 1988, the Rio Grande's parent corporation,
Rio Grande Industries, purchased
Southern Pacific Transportation Company, and as the result of a merger, the larger Southern Pacific Railroad name was chosen for identity. The Rio Grande operated as a separate division of the Southern Pacific, until that company was acquired by the
Union Pacific Railroad. Today, most former D&RGW main lines are owned and operated by the Union Pacific while several branch lines are now operated as
heritage railways by various companies.

History

Baldwin'sMontezuma, 1871, The first locomotive built for the Denver & Rio Grande. The Montezuma's design was used on the #4 locomotive at
Disneyland, the Ernest S. Marsh, in addition to the four locomotives at
Tokyo Disneyland.

D&RGW logo used 1908–1921

Overview

The Denver & Rio Grande Railway (D&RG) was incorporated on October 27, 1870 by General
William Jackson Palmer (1836-1909), and a board of four directors. It was originally announced that the new 3 ft (914 mm) railroad would proceed south from
Denver and travel an estimated 875 miles (1,408 km) south to El Paso via Pueblo, westward along the Arkansas River, and continue southward through the
San Luis Valley of Colorado toward the
Rio Grande.[2] Closely assisted by his friend and new business partner
Dr. William Bell, Palmer's new "Baby Road" laid the first rails out of Denver on July 28, 1871 and reached the location of the new town of
Colorado Springs (then the Fountain Colony) by October 21.
Narrow gauge was chosen in part because construction and equipment costs would be relatively more affordable when weighed against that of the prevailing
standard gauge. Palmer's first hand impressions of the
Ffestiniog Railway in Wales buoyed his interest in the narrow-gauge concept which would prove to be advantageous while conquering the mountainous regions of the Southwest. Eventually the route of the D&RG would be amended (including a plan to continue south from Pueblo over Raton Pass) and added to as new opportunities and competition challenged the railroad's expanding goals.[3]

Feverish, competitive construction plans provoked the
1877–1880 war over right of way with the
Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway. Both rivals hired gunslingers and bought politicians while courts intervened to bring settlement to the disagreements. One anecdote of the conflict recounts June 1879 when the Santa Fe defended its roundhouse in
Pueblo with
Dodge City toughs led by
Bat Masterson; on that occasion, D&RG treasurer R. F. Weitbrec paid the defenders to leave. In March 1880, a Boston Court granted the AT&SF the rights to Raton Pass, while the D&RG paid an exorbitant
$1.4 million for the trackage extending through the
Arkansas River's
Royal Gorge. The D&RG's possession of this route allowed quick access to the booming mining district of
Leadville, Colorado. While this "Treaty of Boston" [3] did not exactly favor the purist of original D&RG intentions, the conquering of new mining settlements to the west and the future opportunity to expand into Utah was realized from this settlement.

By late 1880 William Bell had begun to organize railway construction in Utah that would become the Palmer controlled
Denver & Rio Grande Western Railway in mid-1881. The intention of the D&RGW (aka the "Western") was to work eastward from Provo to an eventual link with westward bound D&RG in Colorado. This physical connection was realized near
Green River, Utah on March 30, 1883, and by May of that year the D&RG formally leased its Utah subsidiary as previously planned. By mid-1883, financial difficulties due to aggressive growth and expenditures led to a shake up among the D&RG board of directors, and General Palmer resigned as president of the D&RG in August 1883, while retaining that position with the Western. Frederick Lovejoy would soon fill Palmer's vacated seat on the D&RG, the first in a succession of post Palmer presidents that would attempt to direct the railroad through future struggles and successes. Following bitter conflict with the Rio Grande Western during lease disagreements and continued financial struggles, the D&RG went into receivership in July 1884 with court appointed receiver William S. Jackson in control. Eventual foreclosure and sale of the original Denver & Rio Grande Railway resulted within two years and the new Denver & Rio Grande Railroad took formal control of the property and holdings on July 14, 1886 with Jackson appointed as president. General Palmer would continue as president of the Utah line until retirement (due to company re-organization) in 1901.[3]

The route over Tennessee Pass had steep grades, and it was not uncommon to see trains running with midtrain and rear-end helpers. In 1997, a year after the D&RGW/SP merger with Union Pacific, the UP closed the line. Although it has been out of service for nearly two decades, the rails are still in usable condition, though many of the signals have been ravaged by time and vandals. In 2011, under a federal Beautification Grant, a private contractor removed and scrapped the railroad's overhead signal pole lines.

Unlike other lines with open observation cars for non first class passengers, the D&RGW operated theirs for an additional 25 cent charge. The cars were available during the summer months on both the Royal Gorge and the Black Canyon (Shavano) routes.

D&RGW train #1, The Royal Gorge, pictured on the 1960 timetable cover.

D&RGW's Royal Gorge at the bottom of the gorge with the suspension bridge above.

The train in the shadow of Colorado's highest mountain, Mount Elbert.

San Juan Extension

DRGW Alamosa Roundhouse, June 1967.

The D&RG also pushed west from
Walsenburg, Colorado over
La Veta Pass (now "Old La Veta Pass") by 1877. At the time the 'Uptop' depot on Veta Pass, rising over 9,500 feet (2,900 m) in elevation, boasted the highest elevation for a narrow-gauge railroad. The railroad reached
Alamosa by 1878. From Alamosa, a line was pushed south through
Antonito eventually reaching
Santa Fe, New Mexico (the
Chili Line) and west as far as
Creede, Colorado. A line containing one of the longest tangent tracks in U.S. railroading (52.82 miles or 85 kilometres) also linked Alamosa with
Salida to the north. From Antonito a line was built over 10,015 feet (3,053 m)
Cumbres Pass, along the
Colorado-
New Mexico border, reaching
Durango, Colorado in August 1881 and continuing north to the rich mining areas around
Silverton in July 1882. A line was also constructed in 1902 as a standard-gauge line, perhaps in anticipation of possible
standard gauging of the entire line, south from Durango, Colorado to
Farmington, New Mexico. Originally hauling mainly agricultural products and serving as a deterrent to the Santa Fe building up from the south, the line was
converted to narrow gauge in 1923,[4] and later delivered pipe and other construction materials to the local oil and natural gas industry into the 1960s.

Tennessee Pass

D&RGW train at Tennessee Pass, circa 1910s or 1920s.

The D&RG built west from Leadville over 10,240 feet (3,120 m)
Tennessee Pass in an attempt to reach the mining areas around
Aspen, Colorado before its rival railroad in the area, the
Colorado Midland, could build a line reaching there. The D&RG built a line through
Glenwood Canyon to
Glenwood Springs, reaching Aspen in October 1887. The D&RG then joined with the Colorado Midland to build a line from Glenwood Springs connecting with D&RG at Grand Junction. Originally considered a secondary branch route to Grand Junction, the entire route from Leadville to Grand Junction was upgraded to standard gauge in 1890, and the original narrow-gauge route via Marshall Pass became a secondary route.

Denver & Rio Grande Western

The D&RGW Business Car 101, originally built as a
passenger car was converted to a business car at the Burnham shop in 1929 and is now restored as the
Abraham Lincoln

The original Denver & Rio Grande Western Railway built a narrow-gauge line from
Ogden, Utah via
Soldier Summit, Utah to
Grand Junction, Colorado. The railroad became the Rio Grande Western Railway in 1889 as part of a finance plan to upgrade the line from narrow gauge to standard gauge, and built several branch lines in Utah to reach lucrative coal fields. It was the railway which
Gustaf Nordenskiöld employed to haul boxcars of relics from the
Mesa Verde, Colorado, cliff dwellings, in 1891, en route to the
National Museum of Finland. In 1901, the Denver & Rio Grande merged with the Rio Grande Western, consolidating in 1908. However, the railroad was weakened by speculators, who had used the Rio Grande's equity to finance
Western Pacific Railroad construction. The
United States Railroad Administration (USRA) took over the D&RG during
World War I. In 1918 the D&RG fell into receivership after the bankruptcy of Western Pacific. The Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad (D&RGW or DRGW) was incorporated in 1920, and formally emerged as the new re-organization of the old Denver & Rio Grande Railroad on July 31, 1921.[5]

Moffat Road

A portion of a DRGW
gondola car showing the Royal Gorge/Moffat Tunnel logo in 1943.

In 1931, the D&RGW acquired the Denver and Salt Lake Western Railroad, a
paper railroad subsidiary of the
Denver and Salt Lake Railroad, (D&SL) which had acquired the rights to build a 40-mile (64 km) connection between the two railroads. After years of negotiation, the D&RGW gained trackage rights on the D&SL from Denver to the new cutoff. In 1932, the D&RGW began construction of the
Dotsero Cutoff east of Glenwood Springs to near
Bond on the
Colorado River, at a location called Orestod (Dotsero spelled backward). Construction was completed in 1934, giving
Denver a direct transcontinental link to the west.[6] The D&RGW slipped into bankruptcy again in 1935. Emerging in 1947, it merged with the D&SL on March 3, 1947, gaining control of the "Moffat Road" through the
Moffat Tunnel and a branch line from Bond to
Craig, Colorado.

"Fast Freights" and the California Zephyr, 1950–1983

Rio Grande Industries logo, used 1948–1967

Finally free from financial problems, the D&RGW now possessed a direct route from Denver to Salt Lake City (the detour south through Pueblo and Tennessee Pass was no longer required for direct service), but a problem still remained: for transcontinental service, the
Union Pacific's more northerly line was far less mountainous (and, as a result, several hours faster). The D&RGW's solution was its "fast freight" philosophy, which employed multiple diesel locomotives pulling short, frequent trains. This philosophy helps to explain why the D&RGW, despite its proximity to one of the nation's most productive
coal mining regions, retired coal-fueled
steam locomotives as quickly as new, replacement diesels could be purchased. By 1956, the D&RGW's standard-gauge steam locomotives had been retired and scrapped. The reason for this was that unlike steam locomotives, diesel locomotives could easily be combined, using the diesels'
multiple unit capabilities, to equip each train with the optimum horsepower which was needed to meet the D&RGW's aggressive schedule.

The California Zephyr pulled by D&RGW locomotives along the Colorado River in Western Colorado.

The D&RGW's sense of its unique geographical challenge found expression in the form of the California Zephyr, a passenger train which was jointly operated with the
Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad (CB&Q) from Chicago to Denver, the D&RGW from Denver to Salt Lake City, and the
Western Pacific Railroad from Salt Lake City to
Oakland, California (with ferry and bus connections to
San Francisco). Unable to compete with the Union Pacific's faster, less mountainous route and 39-hour schedules, the California Zephyr offered a more leisurely journey – a "rail cruise" – with ample vistas of the Rockies. Although the California Zephyr ran at full capacity and turned a modest profit from its 1949 inception through the late 1950s, by the mid-1960s the train was profitable only during the late spring, summer, and fall. In 1970, Western Pacific, claiming multimillion-dollar losses, dropped out. However, the D&RGW refused to join the national
Amtrak system, and continued to operate its share of the Zephyr equipment as the Rio Grande Zephyr between Denver and Salt Lake City until 1983, when Amtrak rerouted the San Francisco Zephyr to the Moffat Road line and renamed it the California Zephyr.

Even as the D&RGW exploited the best new standard-gauge technology to compete with other transcontinental carriers, the railroad continued to operate the surviving steam-powered
narrow-gauge lines, including the famed narrow-gauge line between
Durango and
Silverton, Colorado. Most of the remaining narrow-gauge trackage was abandoned in the 1950s and 1960s. At the end of 1970 it operated 1,903 miles (3,063 km) of road on 3,227 miles (5,193 km) of track; that year it carried 7733 ton-miles of revenue freight and 21 million passenger-miles.

Consolidation with Southern Pacific

In 1988,
Rio Grande Industries, the company that controlled the D&RGW under the direction of
Philip Anschutz, purchased the
Southern Pacific Transportation Company (SP). The D&RGW used Southern Pacific's name with SP due to its name recognition among shippers. In time, the D&RGW's fast freight philosophy gave way to SP's long-established practice of running long, slow trains. A contributing factor was the rising cost of
diesel fuel, a trend that set in after the
1973 oil crisis, which gradually undermined the D&RGW's fuel-consuming "fast freight" philosophy. By the early 1990s, the combined Rio Grande/Southern Pacific system had lost much of the competitive advantage that made it attractive to transcontinental shippers, and became largely dependent on hauling the high-quality coal produced in the mine fields of Colorado and Utah.

D&RGW locomotives retained their reporting marks and colors after the consolidation with the Southern Pacific and would do so until the Union Pacific merger. The one noticeable change was to Southern Pacific's "Bloody Nose" paint scheme. The serif font on the sides of the locomotives was replaced by the Rio Grande's "speed lettering", which was utilized on all SP locomotives built after the merger.

Merger with Union Pacific

D&RGW 5384, patch-renumbered into UP 8637

On September 11, 1996, Anschutz sold the combined D&RGW/SP system with the parent company
Southern Pacific Rail Corporation to the
Union Pacific Corporation, partly in response to the earlier merger of
Burlington Northern and
Santa Fe which formed the
Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway. As the Union Pacific absorbed the D&RGW into its system, signs of the fabled mountain railroad's existence are slowly fading away. D&RGW 5371, the only original D&RGW locomotive in full Rio Grande paint on the Union Pacific, was retired by UP in December, 2008. As previously promised by UP, the D&RGW 5371 was donated to the Utah State Railroad Museum at Ogden's Union Station on August 17, 2009, and will reside in the Eccles Rail Center at the south end of the building. The museum is located at 25th Street and Wall Ave in Ogden, Utah. Many other Rio Grande locomotives still run in service with Union Pacific, but have been "patch-renumbered," with a patch applied over the locomotive's number and the number boards replaced. This method allows the locomotives to be numbered into the Union Pacific's roster but is cheaper than fully repainting the engine into UP Armour Yellow.

Passenger trains

D&RGW passenger train at the
Colorado Railroad Museum. The F9 A&B diesel electric locomotives (1955) were used for the California Zephyrs and Rio Grande Zephyrs.

California Zephyr headed by D&RGW locomotives passes through the Colorado Rockies in winter.

D&RGW locomotive on the next to last run of the California Zephyr, March 21, 1970, at Salt Lake City.

This is a partial list of D&RGW passenger trains. Westbound trains had odd numbers, while eastbound trains had even numbers. Many of the trains were named and renamed as well as being re-numbered. There are over 180 names on a complete list of all the railroad's named trains.[7]

1940–2009 (operated by ANSCO after 1988), 2016-present (operated by Amtrak)

Remnants

The Union Pacific acquired all D&RG owned assets at the time of the merger. The UP operates the former D&RGW main line as part of its
Central Corridor. However, several branch lines and other assets have been sold, abandoned or re-purposed. These include several presently operating
heritage railways that trace their origins to the Denver & Rio Grande Western.

Still-active and rebuilt features

Active rail assets tracing their heritage to the D&RGW that are not part of the Union Pacific network today include: